Tag: land grabs

Zim intensifies war against white farmers

Zimbabwe has intensified its war against white farmers. The land grab has already sparked severe food shortages and has contributed to massive inflation.

The country’s lands and resettlement minister Douglas Mombeshora wants at least 163 white commercial farmers in Mashonaland East evicted with no compensation.

This follows after President Robert Mugabe recent vows to expel the country’s last remaining white farmers from their land.

“We don’t need a white man to continue to guide us. No. We are now equipped with skills,” Mugabe was quoted as saying during a party to celebrate his 91st birthday in Victoria Falls last Saturday.

The land grabs were set to continue despite Mugabe publicly admitting earlier that ill-equipped black “war veterans”, have laid to waste vast tracts of farmland seized from whites under his controversial land reforms.

But Mugabe nevertheless continues to reward his party cronies and political allies with farms confiscated from whites.

According to New Zimbabwe.com, more than 160 white commercial farmers in Mashonaland East province will soon be removed from their properties as the government says they are occupying the land “illegally”.

Meanwhile, News Day reported on Thursday that the European Union had warned Mugabe over his threat for more land grabs saying the move could ruin business re-engagement efforts between Zimbabwe and the EU block.

The EU recently lifted restrictions on most government officials, but retained Mugabe and his wife Grace on the sanctions list.

“Whites will never own land in Zimbabwe”

Mugabe and his ruling Zanu-PF party launched the land reforms in 2000, taking over white-owned farms to resettle only black Shona peasants belonging to his own tribe, to “correct colonial land ownership imbalances”.

At least 4 000 white commercial farmers were evicted from their farms, together with black Ndebele peasants. Mugabe launched an ethnic cleansing campaign after independence in which 20 000 black Ndebeles were massacred by his ruling tribe.

The land seizures have often been violent, claiming the lives of several white farmers, but despite losing ownership, many have survived unlike their white South African counterparts.

Some “war veterans” from Zimbabwe’s 1970s liberation struggle claiming land, are teenagers or in their twenties, adding to the sad farce.

‘South African land grabs not an option’ – or is it?

The idea of claiming land without compensation is “out of touch with reality”, Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti said on Friday.

“Land grabs are not an option, there is no policy like that. By doing so you will have to change the Constitution,” he said.

“It is an option that is completely out of touch with reality.”

Nkwinti was briefing reporters in Boksburg on the East Rand after a meeting on the progress of the land reform green paper.

His deputy, Lechesa Tsenoli, said the National Reference Group, which constituted of representatives from traditional leadership, organised agriculture, emerging farmers and government, brought feedback on what had emerged from different aspects of the green paper.

The feedback focused on the three-tier land tenure system, the office of the Valuer-General, the Land Rights Management Board and the Land Management Commission, among others.

Tsenoli said the group was ensuring that work on the green paper proceeded at a “rapid pace”.

“These timelines are a key thing. We need to devise new timeframes to bring forward those projects that were meant to be done at a later stage,” Tsenoli said.

“We must take stock of where we are at and in mid-March complete and merge with consolidated reports — then be able to brief Cabinet.”

He said the issue of land reform needed to be dealt with “sensitively”.

“For some it is an issue of life and death. For the state, doing it speedily will prevent that,” he said.

“The right thing to do is to establish policy and legislation to redistribute land in a fair manner.”

He said several groups did not accept the historical statistic that 87 percent of the land was white owned.

“They said that we must commission professors to research the statistics.”

He said one of the pivotal issues in land reform was the idea of “willing buyer, willing seller”.

“When a farmer hears that the land could be bought, he trebles the price of the farm. ‘If it is the State then milk it,’ they say.”

Nkwinti said the idea of “willing buyer, willing seller” could not work when the State was involved.  – SAPA

“When the State enters the market, it disfigures it because it has a social responsibility and a political responsibility. The idea only works when it is done between two people,” Nkwinti said.

He said the office of the Valuer-General would address the flaws in the idea.

“With land distribution we need an institution to set the norms and standards so that there will continue to be normalised trade,” he said.

“We hope that this is the right thing to do… within the Constitution.”